BOSTON—It’ll be a year ago Saturday that Brian Burke fired Ron Wilson as head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs. And while many fans of the club have never stopped rejoicing about that long-overdue bit of bloodletting, the thought of it still causes Burke to lower his gaze in lament.

They’d been friends since college, he and Wilson, co-captains of the hockey team at Providence College. And for a few fleeting moments during their partnership in Toronto, you might have been convinced that the cocksure scions of USA Hockey had co-concocted a recipe for the rebirth of Canada’s eternal punchline of a sports franchise.

Alas, the last of the Burke-Wilson Maple Leaf teams went from first overall in November to fallen off the cliff by February. Soon enough, Burke was finding out his 30-plus-year friendship with Wilson wasn’t completely fireproof.

“(Wilson’s) younger daughter got married that summer. Ron suggested it’d be better if I didn’t come to the wedding, which I was looking forward to,” Burke was saying. “There was a lot to it that was unpleasant.”

Burke was holding court here at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on Friday, appearing on a panel entitled: “It’s Not You, It’s Me: Breakups in Sports.” Seeing as he’s a little more than seven weeks removed from his own unceremonious parting from Leafland, the former GM was both a perfect panelist and a prickly one.

While Burke acknowledged that being shown the door as Leafs GM was difficult to swallow — “There’s a humiliating aspect to it,” he said — it’d be difficult to make the case it humbled him.

Sure, Burke has gone from hockey’s version of the Pope — the head of a club he called the game’s “Vatican” — to being something more akin to a rogue preacher, a part-time scout for the Anaheim Ducks and a for-hire speaker. But he’s nobody’s victim. He’s still pulling in millions on the remaining years of his contract with the Leafs. And if he’s accusing Wilson of holding a grudge — their relationship is “fine now,” he said — Burke spent much of Friday’s seminar taking aim at familiar targets of disdain.

“As a GM, if you pay attention to what the sports writers write, you’re a fool,” he said. “The sports page, when you are losing, has value only if you own a puppy or a parakeet.”

The denizens of broadcast and digital media will be happy to know they were not immune from Burke’s territorial spreadings.

“The worst thing that ever happened to sports was talk radio,” Burke said. “And the internet is talk radio on steroids with lower IQs.”

You had to take it all with the usual shaker of salt, of course. And give Burke credit: At least he turned the gun on himself now and then.

“I’ve never seen a loaded weapon in a boardroom yet,” he said, speaking of the problem of overpaying free agents — to which he more than once fell victim. “So if I’m (over)paying a guy, it’s not because someone’s got a revolver to my head. It’s because I’m an idiot.”

No, Burke hasn’t lost his touch for reeling off scrappy zingers. And no, he hasn’t lost his appetite for zigging while others zag. At times on Friday it seemed as though Burke was going out of his way to provoke and inflame.

Never mind that he was speaking at a student-run conference dedicated to the study of hard data in sports. Never mind that his daughter Katie, an MIT Sloan alumnus, has been involved with the organizing committee and introduced his panel. Burke paid only occasional deference to the value of statistical analysis, the numbers-based approach to management popularized in part by the book Moneyball.

“Numbers are overrated a lot of the time ... It’s an eyeball business ... You’ve still got to watch guys ... No one’s ever won a title with Moneyball.”

Burke’s old-school insistences drew more than a few uncomfortable silences from the assembled gathering of stat enthusiasts.

While the MIT Sloan conference has been affectionately billed Dorkapalooza by EPSN columnist Bill Simmons, it’s the annual gathering place of something far bigger than a cult movement. Such is the mainstream acceptance of advanced stats that a passing grasp of the science is bare-minimum stuff for GMs in baseball and football and basketball. Hockey, meanwhile, generally lags behind the other major North American pro sports in its data-based embrace. Still, a handful of NHL teams sent representatives to the conference. The Vancouver Canucks have three employees accredited. The Minnesota Wild and Tampa Bay Lightning are on hand.

“Statistics are like a lamp post to a drunk: Useful for support but not for illumination,” Burke said. “Statistics are going to tell you something. Where you take that data and where you take that research and apply it and add it to the other data sources you have — that’s where you’ll be successful. If you look at statistics and point to a column and say, ‘We’re drafting this guy’ — have fun. I hope you’re in my division.”

On Friday afternoon, a few hundred hockey-inclined types took in an academic presentation on a new system to value NHL players called THoR (Total Hockey Rating). It was interesting food for thought — executives Kevin Lowe and Craig MacTavish from the Edmonton Oilers were among the attentively assembled.

Burke, his moment in the spotlight long finished, was not.

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